Art & Design editor DAVIDE GIBSON looks back on two standout booths at Frieze London.
Frieze can feel like a disorientating rush—everything comes in snippets. Even the most complete solo-booths zip by and disappear into the crowd moments later. The fair is neatly partitioned into transient impressions, all stimulating, yet fleeting. Hence, the works that stand out are ultimately those which find ways of engaging with the space beyond the temporary walls.
This year, down one end of the big tent, the Artist-to-Artist section was filled with sharp hiss and thud of a drum kit. Hesitant at first, people would flock towards the curved row of reflective mobile boards from behind which the sound could be heard. It was the Champ Lacombe’s space, showing Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom’s Before, During & After: Here Now, Before, During & After: Here Soon (2020 – 2024). Besides the mobile boards and hidden drums, a printed carpet, a single-channel video, and six double-sided prints completed the booth.
Since 2020, Boakye-Yiadom has been learning to play percussion, using the process to explore the body’s role in performance and labour. Lessons take the shape of pre-recorded instructions, and happen only during performances. The series raises the question of concealment in labour, using an instrument intimately linked to bodily movement and rhythm, while obscuring the view of the body itself.
The result was an air of curiosity. The artist’s tentative drumming and the viewers’ shy interest united in a dialogue that unfolded beyond Champ Lacombe’s space. In an accompanying text, Ligon shared the artist’s belief that “artworks are unfinished conversations,” and the questions invited by concealment amounted to an ongoing call and response.
To this call Boakye-Yiadom applied a powerful layer of mystery. Visitors approached the sound and saw their own reflection in the mobile boards. Brief glimpses of the artist flashed through the gaps between them. The prints lining two of the walls—close-ups of a numbered lock belonging to the storage unit in which the drums are kept—added to the impression of being locked out. But rounding the boards revealed a different view: one of the artist in the learning process, earnestly focused and vulnerable. The sonic and physical exchange between viewer and performer led to an engaging search, and the body was placed—spotlighted—at its culmination.
On the other side of the tent, in the “Focus” section, Rose Easton’s booth presented a domestic space. In it, Eva Gold showed a sequence of works: You were disgusting and that’s why I followed you (2024), Acts of Violence (after Tarkovsky) (2024), and Acts of Violence (after Haneke) (2024). The space was filled with a beige sofa and armchair, surrounding a stack of paper, facing two drawings. The booth invited visitors to sit with Gold’s work.
The stacked paper was a printout of murky, layered text by the artist. It addressed the viewer directly:
“So, if you could just sit down there on the couch and look straight into the camera, just here.
There, that’s it, perfect.”
It continued across six numbered sections, each subsequent one revealing more, but never turning fully transparent. Gradually, a story coalesced—the arc of an exploitative relationship that opened with the work’s title. The first-person narrator recounted being manipulatively filmed in a relationship, followed by an intervention and its aftermath. It grappled with the notion of looking back on the past and placing blame. Gold’s writing was skilfully opaque, slowly grasping at images and scenes as if remembering them.
The voyeurism explored in the story was deepened by the space. The watchful sofa and armchair sustained the text’s unsettling tone. They faced two drawings of barn fires: stills from Mirror (1975) and The White Ribbon (2009). The two films take the form of recollections, their plots centred around processing the past through memory. Their reference served to flesh out the text’s concern with retracing events, and visually underscored its insinuation of violence and abuse.
From the sofas, visitors to Frieze experienced the fair drone around them. Different configurations of people would appear in the space, resting and chatting, though never losing awareness of the artwork. In this sense, the booth performed a very practical role, but the context created by Gold’s work pushed its use into grotesqueness. A disgust was burned into the furniture’s fabric from its appearance in the text, and reignited by the bizarre, uncomfortable idea of indifferently watching a tragedy unfold from a living room. By making use of the seating, visitors acted out that scene for the passing crowds.
An assistant at Champ Lacombe suggested I return to their booth later in the day, so before leaving I made my way back. This time, there was no score or artist. The kit was placed in front of the boards. The prints were now flipped to show shots of the drums seemingly being played, but with no sign of the player. A promise, “Here SOON,” was printed on the bass drum. The work had shifted, but still provoked conversation about concealment by citing the unseen performance. Boakye-Yiadom accounted for ways in which viewers can interact with the work both physically, as with the first encounter, and temporally, by returning to find a rewording of his set of ideas. Similarly, Eva Gold crafted an experience that spoke directly to the viewer and enveloped them. The artist invited the crowds into a scene where they found themselves acting out her allusive narrative while exploring the work. In the midst of the fair’s immediacy and pace, these two works managed to be more than fragments in the big Frieze jigsaw.
Featured image courtesy of Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom and Champ Lacombe.
